The National Population Commission (NPC) has said that it will count special citizens such as the mentally challenged persons and lunatics living in the country as part of efforts to ensure that everybody is counted during the forthcoming headcount in March and April 2023.
The NPC Federal Commissioner in charge of Enugu State, Ejike Ezeh, disclosed this in Enugu during the training of journalists in the state on the effective reporting of the forthcoming National Census.
He said the commission had already concluded plans to identify the mad and homeless persons, adding that people doing peculiar jobs would equally be reached in their duty posts.
The commissioner also disclosed that the commission’s officials had been trained on how to identify the ages of individuals who may be able to know their own ages.
He said, “We have identified every point where these special people stay. They will be the first to be counted and in the case of the mentally challenged people, we will be counting them at midnight when they would have been calmer. So, we will use village people and those conversant with their environment to get to them.”
He said the training titled: ‘Capacity-Building Workshop For Journalists On Effective Reporting For 2023 Population and Housing Census,’ was envisioned to achieve a credible 2023 census.
According to him, the exercise was aimed at training journalists on those processes and methodologies that would be employed during the 2023 National Population and Housing Census to enable them to report accurately.
Ezeh said the forthcoming census scheduled to take place between March and April, 2023 was going to be a digital one.
Ezeh said: “Press being a very vital partner in progress towards the census, we deemed it very important to sit with them and try to understand ourselves.
“As far as information is concerned, the press is the gateway of disseminating it.”
